On Media

FBI faked Seattle Times to catch suspect

By HADAS GOLD

10/28/2014 11:50 AM EDT

The FBI wrote a fake news story and used a fake Seattle Times-like web address in 2007 in order to catch a suspect in a bomb threat, the Seattle Times reports.

In 2007, the FBI's Seattle office created a fake story with an Associated Press byline about bomb threats at schools with an email link “in the style of The Seattle Times." The story was sent via MySpace to a teenager suspected of sending bomb threats to a high school in the area. Once the suspect clicked on the link, hidden software sent his location to the FBI, and he was arrested.

Kathy Best, the editor of the Seattle Times, said the newspaper is "outraged" at the FBI.

“Not only does that cross a line, it erases it,” Best said, according to the Times. “Our reputation and our ability to do our job as a government watchdog are based on trust. Nothing is more fundamental to that trust than our independence — from law enforcement, from government, from corporations and from all other special interests,” Best said. “The FBI’s actions, taken without our knowledge, traded on our reputation and put it at peril.”

FBI officials defended the practice, saying it is used in rare circumstances to prevent a possible tragedy.

“Every effort we made in this investigation had the goal of preventing a tragic event like what happened at Marysville and Seattle Pacific University,” Frank Montoya Jr., the special agent in charge of the FBI in Seattle, told the Times. “We identified a specific subject of an investigation and used a technique that we deemed would be effective in preventing a possible act of violence in a school setting."

We are extremely concerned and find it unacceptable that the FBI misappropriated the name of The Associated Press and published a false story attributed to AP. This ploy violated AP’s name and undermined AP’s credibility.